There has always been, for me, this other world, this second world to fall back on--a more reliable world in so far as it does not hide that its premise is illusion.

How quick and rushing life can sometimes seem, when at the same time it's so slow and sweet and everlasting.

Structure that really pays off is all based on emotion. I don't write down an elaborate plan. It's really done by feel. It's one area of my writing that I think I've got surer at as I've evolved. In my work you often get an abrupt shift in time, a jolt. But the emotional logic will take the reader on. I hope. I trust. After all, our memories do not work with any sequential logic.

I do my thinking while I walk. It just loosens up the mind in the way that you don't get when you are sitting at a desk.

I think what I like to do is to begin with the ordinary and find the extraordinary in it.

You may have your suspicions, your fears, you may even believe there is something, somewhere, terribly, drastically wrong, but because someone else is in charge, because there is a part of the system above you which you don't know, you don't question it, you even distrust your own doubts.

I respond to the sound of London being spoken - to the sound of London.